How often do you think about breathing? If you are like most, probably not much. Breathing is so automatic that we often don’t give it a second thought. We go through our day and our attention is given to everything that calls for it, but rarely do most people intentionally create time and space to focus solely on breathing. It seems that we only think about our breath when we can’t seem to “catch it,” whether that be from an asthma attack, bronchitis, covid-19, lung cancer, etc. Why is that? Why is it that the very thing that keeps us going and we are so very dependent on gets so little attention? The companion that has been with you since birth when you took your first inhale and then cried out in exhalation is often forgotten and underappreciated, which is why today I’m going to close this month long blogging series with the practice of prāṇāyāma, which is the conscious control of the movement of prāna (vital energy). In modern times, this is known as breathing, which moves oxygen through the body to nourish life and to give energy to each part.
The mind and the prāna (energy) have an intertwined relationship. Where the mind goes, prāna follows. Often, when we aren’t readily able to understand what is happening mentally. We can’t consciously see the thought, but we can notice our physical body to see our breath has shallowed, become ragged, hurried, or stopped altogether (side note: Often our muscles tense as well.) The breath is an activity that we can consciously engage with to kickstart the parasympathetic nervous system when our sympathetic nervous system has gone into a frenzy. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for your fight or flight stress response, which is part of your primitive/reptilian brain. These responses do their best to keep us “safe” and served us well when we were living in a hunter/gatherer society amongst the wild animals and nature. However, as we’ve evolved, it seems our reptilian brain hasn’t evolved with us.
Our lives have changed and danger is now rarely life or death. It’s more often what our ancestors would consider a minor stressor such as a disagreement with a coworker, piles of work on our desk that need to get done, children or spouse’s pushing our buttons, bills waiting to be paid, a hard discussion we don’t want to have, etc. Our reptilian brain, however, doesn’t know this and often reacts as though these matters are critical to survival forcing us into a fight or flight response. The fight response is when we ready ourselves for battle to overtake the “attacker” and flight is obviously that we prepare to run for our lives… both of which hope to secure our survival. When fight is triggered we can find ourselves wrapped up in a lot of unnecessary conflict. Alternatively, when flight kicks in, we can find ourselves avoiding important facets of our lives (I can’t deal with those bills, it might kill me)… avoiding the problem until it grows so large that we are forced to deal with it. Often, that’s when we wind up seeking the help we need because we feel as though we are buried in a life of struggle, heaviness, and have lost the childlike wonder, excitement, and joy we may have felt previously in our lives.
Breath practice is so important because our breath is the only facet we have to kickstart our parasympathetic nervous system, which controls our rest response. The practice of prāṇāyāma can be done on its own, with meditation, and is often used in conjunction with asana, which I covered in my last blog. On its own, it has the ability to calm the nerves during meditation to allow for a deeper experience. With asana, it has the ability to calm the nerves while also directing the energy where it is needed in each posture. When we pull the energy away from the stressors, we now have more energy to direct toward things that elevate our lives and bring more joy, love, peace, fun, excitement, health, strength, etc. in. This is the goal of yoga, to learn how to direct our energy in the direction of service… serving us, serving others, serving the world. We can’t serve if we’re always running away or fighting some threat, which is why learning the techniques to quell the auto-response mechanisms we have in our system is so important. Think about what happens when you allow your phone to auto-text. Often it says, something crazy like, “What the duck?” when you know what you really meant. Same thing happens when we allow our systems auto-response to control our lives. We wind up with subpar results that we did not intend and end up with the feeling of victimhood because we’ve lost control of our lives. By gaining control of and focusing on the breath, we tell the body that we are in control and everything is well. The reptilian brain says, “Well if she’s breathing so deeply and peacefully, we must have a false alarm here. Let’s abort the mission and kick our feet up instead.”
“Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.”
– Thich Nhat Hahn
Side Note: The kids movie, “Inside Out,” is one of my favorites for illustrating these mechanisms work. How profound is it that kids films often teach us everything we need to know, yet we stop watching them until we have kids of our own?
What everyone wants is to feel at peace within themselves. I have yet to meet one person who deep down wants to feel angry, stressed, doubtful, triggered, and annoyed all the time. The 8 limbs that make up the practice of yoga can give you that when you commit to them! I’m living proof!
Please reach out if you’d like to start your practice, go deeper into your practice, or would like some coaching on your path.